Becoming a Thing of Beauty For several weeks I have noticed a pile of sticks in the churchyard from my window.  They had accumulated from the various storms over the last couple of months and someone had stacked them up for eventual removal.   Today as I write this I am watching Brenton Collins do just that.  I was interested to see how he would approach it.  First he pulled his truck as close as he could to the pile.  Then he walked around the pile and examined it a bit.  Then he started picking up sticks one at a time and methodically placing them in the bed of his truck for removal.  Eventually, the pile in the yard was completely gone and it was as good as new.  All the sticks were in the bed of the truck, which could handle them easily.   Do you see an application for your life from that illustration? First of all, if you are like me, there are a lot of sticks in the yard of your life. From time to time we have storms that leave us vulnerable to sin and that sin settles in.   How do we get rid of them?  Someone with a truck big enough to handle the job must come along side to help.  That someone is Jesus.  He wants to remove the sin from our lives. Not just once at the time of our acceptance of Him as savior, but daily as we struggle to live in this fallen world.    Why doesn’t He just sweep it all away quickly and without effort on our part?  Because we need to understand the cost and the process of His cleaning up our lives one part at a time.  We need to see the work involved in taking the sins from our lives and putting them on Him.  He does all the work of salvation.  But if we are to grow in the Lord, we must be involved in the cleansing of our lives as He empowers us to remove the sticks, one stick at a time, and place them on His back.     By the way, once the sticks were gone, Brenton mowed the yard.  Once the sin is out of our lives, we are in a position to mature and grow.  Only then do we become a thing of beauty.   I love being your pastor, Russ